I'm excited to see such active development! I'm extra excited to see that you've made a change to weaponsmiths, my favorite class. A while back I posted a big pile of weaponsmith feedback after playing through Poschengband 5.0.5 with one. I'll paste it here, just in case you find yourself with the time and inclination to make some more weaponsmith changes.

First, thank you for this wonderful class. It got me my first Poschengband winner and kept me entertained for many hours after I killed the serpent.

In the early game, the class is underwhelming. You rarely get to use your smithing abilities except to absorb hit/dam/AC essences. It takes forever to accumulate enough essences from ego items to be able to afford adding egos with Smithing. By the time you accumulate enough early-game ego essences (fire resist, free action, etc.) to smith with them, they’re not going to do a whole lot of good; you’ve already found and equipped good gear with those qualities built in. To fix this, I’d suggest lowering the essence cost of early-game egos.

In the late game, the class is extremely powerful, but much of the Smithing abilities feel superfluous. The problem is that optimal gearing (armor-wise) is virtually always the same: apply slaying to powerful ego armor. You can get your resists and stats elsewhere. It would be much more fun if Smithing armor involved more interesting choices. To fix this, I would allow Weaponsmiths to affect +hit and +dam on armor just like +AC on armor-- separately from the single stat, bonus, resist, sustain, ability, or telepathy. Of course, the size of the hit and damage bonus would need to be lower than what is currently possible when applying slaying. So for any piece of armor you want to use, you max out its hit, dam, just like its AC, then choose something else to add… and that choice would be an interesting one with lots of options. Overall, this would result in weaker Weaponsmiths in the extreme late game, which is probably a good thing, but with much more interesting and frequent Smithing.

Weapons of sharpness don’t drop after a certain depth. As near as I can tell, they’re the only source of the *sharpness* essence in the game, which is one of the best endgame essences. Trying to accumulate enough *sharpness* essences to use in the endgame shouldn’t involve going back and grinding mid-game content for drops. In my copy, I just removed the max depth on the sharpness ego.

Late in the game I found myself resenting the extreme rarity of Crafting scrolls, and thinking that it would be really fun if Weaponsmiths had an ability that worked similarly. What if using the “Absorb all essences” ability on an artifact granted an “essence of crafting” or something, and those could be used to fuel a smithing ability that mimicked a Crafting scroll? Maybe five essences of crafting per use.

It would be nice if the “Remove added essence” ability actually gave you back the essences you remove, like the “Absorb all essences” ability. The fact that it doesn’t makes me hesitant to use Smithing in many situations.

Once again, tons of fun! I enjoyed it immensely, despite the wall of text above. Overall, I’d like to see changes that make Smithing something that Weaponsmiths use more frequently, because crafting stuff is great fun, and of course we want to do it more often

I'm excited to see such active development! I'm extra excited to see that you've made a change to weaponsmiths, my favorite class. A while back I posted a big pile of weaponsmith feedback after playing through Poschengband 5.0.5 with one. [...]
In the late game, the class is extremely powerful, but much of the Smithing abilities feel superfluous. The problem is that optimal gearing (armor-wise) is virtually always the same: apply slaying to powerful ego armor.

That's interesting, because I've had two deep Composband weaponsmith runs, and the one slot where I used arts/randarts instead of smithed egos pretty much throughout was the armor slot. I stored a lot of ego armors at home but they never ended up being as good as the artifact armors; and there's plenty of places to apply slaying.

(Edit: in case you meant protective equipment in general rather than the armor slot specifically, I never applied slaying to more than two items at the same time, and usually just one. Even for an endgame character who really can get his stats and resists elsewhere - not necessarily a given - there are still other very strong options like life rating, immunities and speed. And Clarity somehow ended up making the discussion really often.)

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The Complainer worries about the lack of activity here these days.

First I need to post a changelog because I've already forgotten half of it:

energy randomisation is back up slightly to 18%

many tweaked quests

new species of dragon

dungeon guardian for glass castle (rebreanded to crystal castle)

boldor is evicted from warrens. Mughash takes his job

monsters tweaks. notably, non-unique balrogs take their stats from V

changed which potions do what. Check descriptions in-game

shuffle stock and reserve item available to everyone

new quest for thalos that still needs work

crafting/enchantment scrolls not so rare anymore

duelists attempting to attack an unmarked target will mark it instead of attacking

icky cave is lower level

And maybe some other stuff I don't remember right now.

Susraimian - I have also played a lot of weaponsmiths and I think I agree with Sideways that slaying is not always the best essence for your entire kit. Having said that, I do plan to expand on crafting in general.

I think maybe 1-2 more updates before I upload a binary, still hoping to do it in 2017.

Many small changes to monsters, quests etc. Highlights include a dragon armour shop in Zul, new wand type, weapons that improve light radius doing extra damage vs vuln light creatures (stacks with slays) and a new dungeon.